Pre-Spring Cleanups

If you stop by Devlounge today, you may notice that the articles index has been revamped, making it much easier to find things and giving you more ways to find what you’re looking for. Previously, the articles index was rather confined. It showcased the last three posts from each category, which not only slowed down the loading time because there were so many WordPress loops running at once, but it also may have turned people away from digging deeper into the archives. Some people who looked quick may have been under the impression that all we had was those three articles from each category, and wouldn’t even notice that we actually have a whole slew of content available for your reading pleasure.

The new index is broken down into three sections:

Browse by Category

Browse by Popularity

Browse by Year

The popular section is running off of a newly installed plugin, so it has started calculating the most popular posts as of right now. Because of this, watching the page is like watching Digg spy, because old posts are making it onto the popular list even though they might not be the most popular of our posts. Give this section some time and it will be able to spotlight our best and most read content. If you have any other suggestions for improvements we could make to the Articles index, please feel free to let me know in the replies.

This will in fact be a whole week of updates, a “pre-spring” cleaning of sorts. Other areas I hope to tackle this week include; refresh the interviews page, style the contact form (we had to update it with an anti-spam question to eliminate a recent surge of trash), as well as other improvements and tweaks here and there.